An Excerpt From:

GRAND AMBITION
by Lisa Michaels

Reith Hyde

I wasn't always a cautious man. I did things when I was young that astonish me now -- walking through a blizzard to get to a dance, chopping wedges into trees as thick as wine barrels, sure that I'd step the right way when they fell. But life has a way of blind-siding you, and once I had a family, I could never be so careless again. Still, in this case, I was grateful for my vigilance, because I didn't let myself wait until they were overdue. If I had dawdled, assuming all was well, I could never have forgiven myself.

My son, Glen, and his wife started their voyage in central Utah, on October 20, 1928. They built a boat and planned to follow the Green River south until it became the Colorado, then run that west through the Grand Canyon of Arizona and out to the flats of southern California. This was their honeymoon, a rather strenuous one, by any standard, but she was game. The whole trip was to take seven weeks; they were hoping to set a record for speed. But even if they missed that, Bessie would be the first woman to run the rapids of the Colorado River.

I passed those weeks on tenterhooks. So much time to think. Then, in the middle of November, I got a letter from Glen, posted from a ranch halfway through the Grand Canyon. He said that all was going as planned, and that they expected to pass through the Grand Wash Cliffs by December 2. From there it was a full week of easy drifting to Needles, where they would send a telegram. So when the 9th arrived and there was no news, I packed a knapsack with things I thought might be of use and went directly to the station in Twin Falls. My daughters tried to dissuade me from going. Even Jeanne, the more practical of the two, had to say her piece. But I made it clear I wasn't going to curl up in my rocker and wait for word.

After a full day's travel, the train let me off at a point near the river -- a whistle-stop, right about where California, Nevada, and Arizona come together. Nothing but a board deck jutting off into nowhere. I found a track that led toward the water and started walking upstream. It took me two days to find anyone. I came upon several settlements, but when I got closer, I saw they were ghost towns -- doors swinging open, roofs full of holes. This had to be the most desolate country I'd ever seen. A big bleached-out valley, nothing but clay and salt flats. The river muddy and wide. No wonder everybody gave up and moved on.

At sundown, on my second day on foot, I found a man in a shack by the bank. He said he hadn't left the river for several weeks, and that no one had come by during that time. My son was never a big talker, but after nearly a month in the canyon, I figured he would have pulled over to speak to just about anybody -- you get hungry for companionship after a while. So I knew they hadn't passed that place and must be farther upstream.

That got me nervous -- they'd been delayed for a week. I knew they might have lost a few days here and there to bad weather, but this seemed too long. It gave me the sinking feeling that the boat had got loose and left them stranded. I had never seen the Grand Canyon, but I knew from books that it was wild, inhospitable country, what with the dead-end gorges and lack of springs. Still, I couldn't think of anyone who had better odds of managing himself out there than Glen. Like most Idaho boys, he was ranch-bred. Not prone to panic. He could walk thirty, forty miles in a day if he had to. He knew how to gather dew with candle wax and a bit of flour sacking, and he was a crack shot. When he was in high school, I once watched him fell a deer from three hundred yards. That might not sound like much. But at that distance a deer looks like a mouse. And the bullet drops so far you've got to aim for the head to hit the heart.

I had faith he'd weather this out.

Now his wife was another matter. Bessie was new to the outdoors. She was dreamy, accustomed to cities, thin and always bent over a book. When he first brought her home to the ranch, I wasn't sure how it would go. But she surprised me, that summer before they set off. She put her head down and worked. It was like watching a filly that had looked good for nothing but munching dandelions buck up and start taking fence lengths. She had more strength than you'd expect, given her size.

By the time I'd mulled all this over, pacing along the riverbank, it was dark, and the homesteader was kind enough to let me sleep on his floor. He was a humble fellow, eking out a living on the shore, surviving on fish and stunted vegetables watered by bucket in a salty plot. I had once started out with as little, but he was nearly my age -- perhaps seventy -- and I didn't see things improving for him soon. After he gave me his extra blanket, he asked if I knew what day it was. When I told him it was December 11, he nodded and carved a few marks on the doorjamb. Said he was off by a couple of days, and it didn't matter most of the time, but he liked to celebrate Christmas with the rest of the country.

The next morning, we shared a cup of coffee and said our goodbyes. I was just setting off when he came out of the cabin with a folded handkerchief in his hand. "What's this?" he asked. It was my pocketknife, which I'd left rolled up in the spare blanket. I had hoped he wouldn't find it till I was gone. "You don't owe me nothing," he said, looking offended.

I told him it was a gift, not a payment, and he wasn't supposed to use it until the 25th. Man ought to have something to open on Christmas morning. Still, he tried to hand it back. Finally I told him he'd be doing me a favor if he kept it. I had the feeling I was going to need the help of quite a few strangers before I was through, and I figured what I passed on to one might come back from another. He nodded then, and shook my hand, and when I got to a bend in the river and looked back, he was still there, outside that dismal little shack in the middle of nowhere, watching me leave.

I headed back toward the railway line, turning over scenarios in my mind, keeping the river on my right. Just at sundown, I spotted the cairn I'd left for myself and came out at the tracks. I was prepared to sleep on the platform, but as luck had it, I arrived in time to whistle down the evening train. As soon as the engine chugged east, following the river upstream, I started to feel better. I was headed in their direction. I just had to keep my mind on the task at hand—bettering their odds. Making sure that, if they were holding out somewhere, help went to find them.

Glen and Bessie Hyde

On the 20th of October, 1928, they waved goodbye to the spectators on the bank: watermelon farmers and railroad men with seamed faces and dusty coveralls, who'd heard there was an expedition setting off and dropped their work. Magarel stood apart, a head shorter than the rest, waving his battered Stetson as if fanning away bees. A half-skilled handyman, clinging like a limpet to the Santa Fe line, he'd come by to offer his help building the boat, and when Glen said he couldn't pay, he had offered to work for free. He was the only one who knew them beyond a passing hello. The rest of the crowd stood watching curiously as the scow caught the thread of the current and began to move. Then the owner of the dry goods started to clap, and the rest joined in, until an old drunk started whistling wildly, bent back at the waist, fingers in his teeth, and the applause dissolved into laughter. A less than rousing send-off, but soon the figures were as smooth as clothespins on the duff-colored bank, and Bessie couldn't tell one from the other.

She sat on the bare box springs in the center of the boat, while Glen stood on a cross plank, working the long sweeps. They were plowing through a caramel river -- thick, with a greasy sheen. It ran flat and smooth to the banks, which were bare and just high enough to block the views on either side. A deep ditch, really. A canal. Within it, the boat looked rather substantial: a flat-bottomed barge the size of a peddler's wagon, piled with supplies. A box stove, a .30-30 rifle, two cartons of bullets, crates of canned peaches and tomatoes and beans, rope and blankets. Bessie kept her things wrapped in oilskin: a box camera, twenty-seven dollars in a beaded purse -- a sentimental object, frivolous for any occasion ahead -- pencils, charcoal, a sketchbook, and blank diary.

The thought of that notebook made her pulse quicken. All those empty pages, which would soon be filled with accounts of days she could hardly imagine. That was the thrill of beginning: a burst of pent-up tension, mixed with curiosity. As if someone, somewhere, knew how it would end and wouldn't tell her. For a moment, she imagined that the story was already written, and she was just waiting for the words to appear.

When she looked up, Glen was tying the sweep oars out of the water with a bit of rope. "What are you doing?" she asked.

"Letting us drift for a minute."

She watched him, puzzled. Then he pulled the camera from its crate. "I wanted to take your photograph."

She laughed. "While we plow into a sandbar? That's one way to make the papers. 'Expedition runs aground half a mile from launch. Captain taking girlie pictures.' "

"I never said anything about getting undressed." He pressed his lips against a smile and opened the case. "Not yet," she said. And with one eyebrow arched, she buttoned her leather jacket to the throat.

Glen stared at her through the viewfinder. She was browned from their summer on the ranch, her bobbed hair side-parted and combed close to one cheek. He took in her dark eyes, her slim neck framed by a shearling collar. He never quite managed to tell her how lucky he felt.

Of course, she didn't think she was beautiful. She always shook her head when someone suggested it. He used to think that strange -- how could someone be so blind to herself? -- until he saw her portrait in an old high school annual. She was eighteen, wearing a white-collared dress with a bow, her hair in a wavy bob with a fringe in front, and though no one would have called her homely, neither would anyone have stopped to look at her twice. He remembered glancing up from the photograph. He didn't know her at that age, and the intervening five years had planed the curves from her face, bringing out the fine bones and throwing her eyes into relief. Suddenly he had understood. She still thought of herself as she looked then. Next to her name in the yearbook was a lighthearted horoscope. "You will travel in foreign countries accompanied by a blue-eyed, brown-haired young man who pays the bills. Disposition: jolly, but bashful."

Now, framing her face in the camera lens, he tried to set her at ease. "You look like you're about to get your teeth drilled."

Bessie broke into a smile, relieved to hear the shutter click. She'd never liked having her photograph taken. She wasn't sure why. Perhaps because the camera reserved judgment. Even a nickel sketch artist at an arcade showed his hand more quickly -- you could peer over his shoulder and see what he'd made of you. But the camera would capture her, at good angle or bad, and it would be more than a month till she'd see the result. But that wasn't the only source of her shyness. A year after she and Glen had met, six months into their marriage, she still felt the need to hold herself in a flattering light. She supposed it was natural. In the first rush, they had shared what seemed to be everything -- childhood hurts, their tiny quotidian likes and dislikes -- but there were things that she still hadn't revealed to him, out of fear of what he might think. They had come together so quickly, as if they recognized one another in some physical way. Often when he was absorbed in a task she would find herself staring at the cords in his neck, the firm set of his lips, and a current of pleasure jangled her to the root. Perhaps, she thought now, the two went together: the passion and the uncertainty. Glen wrapped the camera in oilskin and looked out at the riverbank, the soft crumbling ledges. "God, am I glad to leave that gloomy town. Did you see the way those brakemen looked at you when we were loading the boat? One of them called you 'scrappy.' "

"No, he didn't."

"Yes, he did. He said, 'That's the kind of gal you could use in a camp.'"

"Some distinction. But really, I haven't been good for much except passing you the tools."

It was true; she had felt restless in the weeks it had taken Glen to build the boat. Her drawing materials were packed away, and at first she'd spent her days sitting on a pile of grain sacks in the barn he'd borrowed for the work, keeping him company. But watching her husband hammer and plane wore thin after a while. He worked quickly and with confidence, marking the planks with a pencil and sawing through with rhythmic strokes. As she listened to the slowly rising notes of a hammer spiking a nail home, she felt a strange light-headedness steal over her. She had given up so much to make this trip, turned her life inside out like an old shirt. They had been dreaming and planning for a year, and now that the moment had nearly arrived she was anxious to set out. It was one thing to talk of adventure, another to push back from the bank and begin.

While Glen finished the boat, she decided to make it her job to examine the town. If she was going to write an account of their trip, she ought to begin with a thorough description of the launching point.

That lasted about half an hour.

Green River, Utah, was a pitiful place, huddled around a railroad stop on the Rio Grande line. Wide dirt streets without a tree to offer contour or shade, the intersections held down by squat brick buildings: the Midland Hotel & Café, Bebe and Sons Dry Goods, a bank, a barbershop. It was like a model for a place where people might one day live. No point jotting these impressions in her journal—a place of such unrelieved loneliness tends to echo in the mind. Instead she retreated to the hotel, where they had taken a room. It was early October, cold even when the sun shone. They would leave in a week. She made tea on a small burner the proprietor had loaned them and set about straightening their gear.

Glen was glad to see her spending less time in the barn, though he tried not to show his relief. When she sat nearby he felt the need to keep her occupied, to explain each step as he did it, and the talking wore him out. Language was his wife's terrain and he was glad to cede it. What he really wanted was to finish the boat swiftly and in quiet and get on the river before the weather turned colder. On the days when he talked through his work, he felt redoubled gratitude toward Captain Guleke, who had taught him everything he knew about boat making, back when he was nothing but a fence post with an Adam's apple. The old man had spiced these lessons with all his superstitions about how to survive on a river, and so far they had served Glen well. He had the sudden urge to send Guleke a telegram, just a quick word to say they were setting out. He could just picture the pissy expression such a show of feeling would summon in the old man. Good thing he was beyond the reach of telegraph lines most of the time, or Glen would have to dip into their meager cash supply just for the pleasure of getting his goat.

Guleke had made his name running machinery and supplies to miners in the deepest canyons of the Salmon River, and the men who relied on his services claimed it was like having someone deliver you tea in the bowels of hell. He shot through those canyons in his heavy barge, running rapids that made other men bite their tongues with fear, and pulled in at some rocky bank to hand out flour as dry as talc. They said that on the one occasion when Guleke flipped and lost his gear, he lived for two weeks on plug tobacco and river water.

Maybe a telegram wasn't such a bad idea. Under his crust, the old man might be pleased to know they were building a scow like the ones he had mastered. It was a boat designed to take a beating, sixteen feet long and six wide, with long sweep oars extending off each end, and doubled floorboards as a caution against rocks. One of its virtues: it didn't require any special soaking and bending of wood. It was a rectangular box, with the bow and stern tipped outward, so from the side it made a perfect trapezoid, like a child's paper boat.

Still, even Guleke, hard to impress, would have been drop-jawed to hear what they were planning to do with it -- run the scow down the length of the Grand Canyon. Since 1869, when John Wesley Powell first explored the river by boat, only nine expeditions had attempted such a trip. He and Bessie would be the tenth, and the only ones to do it for pleasure. Most of the men who'd made it through had been surveyors -- exploring sites for a dam or a railroad -- or grizzled outdoorsmen, after gold and furs. Only lately had a few parties gone through for publicity, taking photographs and motion pictures. But never had a woman attempted the journey.

As soon as he got the scow roughed together, Glen brought his wife to have a look. They would stow their duffel in two piles -- front and back, for counterbalance. In the center was a clear place to stand and a high bench, nailed across the width of the boat, where they would man the sweeps. Bessie watched as he jumped up to take the handles. A shaft of sun came down through the hayloft window and fell over the scow. She had to admit it looked bizarre, sitting flat on the barn floor, without water softening its lines. The sweeps jutted off the back and front like giant hockey sticks, resting heavily on the floor.

"You stand sideways to the stream," Glen said, turning to face her. "And try to keep the handles about waist height, like this." He slipped a weight sack over each handle, and the long articulated blades lifted as gently as false limbs. There was a little delay, a little creakiness, but they did all right.

"Come and try it," he said, giving her a hand up.

She found it awkward at first, judging the right amount of pressure, but she soon got the knack and worked the oars in soft circles, trying all the points of the blades.

"Of course, they feel different when you're in fast water," Glen said. "Sometimes you'll be going along just fine and an eddy will yank one right out of your hand. And if the blade hits a rock, you fly like a spit wad."

"God, do you have to put it like that?" She laughed and jumped down from the bench. The sides of the scow nearly reached her shoulders. "If you need me during rough water, I'll be right down here," she said, pointing to the floor. "We could rig up some cushions, a little bell."

"All right, Cleopatra." He stepped down to the floorboards and pulled her close. Her hair smelled like lavender. "Do you know what today is?"

"Friday?"

"Friday, October twelfth," he said.

She scanned his face, trying to guess the significance.

"It's our six-month anniversary," he said finally, smiling a little. "I thought women kept track of these things."

She stood on tiptoe and gave him a kiss. "You're sweet to remember." She wrapped her hands around his waist. "So what do you give a girl you've been married to for six months? Napkins, hemp?"

He brushed his thumb along her jaw. "I'm giving this one a boat."

Copyright 2001 by Lisa Michaels.